Dreaming of the Sky
by Heath07
Summary: Pam reflects. PamJimish


Title: Dreaming of the Sky

Author: Heath07

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: I own nothing, etc.

Summary: Pam reflects on her life.

Notes: Just a quickie. It's nothing special, really. Eh. There's some sap and some angst.

* * *

Pam used to be more.

She used to paint. She used to work in oils and pastels and water colours and anything that would stick to a canvas.

She used to be a dreamer. She used to dream in Technicolour about daisies and houses with terraces and canvases bigger than the warehouse. She'd dream about colours so bright they made her heart hurt from their pure beauty—oranges and reds and vibrant greens, colours that could never really exist.

She used to believe in true love. Love that never dimmed. Love that made you feel like you could go anywhere, be anything, do anything.

She's not sure she believes in any of these things anymore…but knows she used to be more.

She thinks these things as she lets the phone go to voicemail and lets out a deep sigh. She's just so _tired._

Her life is a lot different when she reflects on how she thinks it would have turned out…if she'd said no. If she had turned back, hoping to see him in the crowd, offering himself, arms outstretched, willing her to take a chance on something. Take a chance on him. Just this one time. This one time, when it mattered more than anything. But she didn't look back and he wasn't even in the same country.

It wasn't so bad at first. Not at first, she always thinks, but even that is a lie. She should have known when her honeymoon consisted of a weekend in Mineral Springs where Roy drank himself into a stupor and puked the $5.99 buffet down her perfectly white gown. Soda water did nothing but move the stain around and the smell got so bad by Sunday that she threw the dress in the dumpster behind their low-price hotel before heading back to Scranton.

When she got to work on Monday there were congratulations. Michael even bought a cheap bottle of champagne and they all drank from white paper cups while he toasted the new couple. Dwight got drunk off his glass and kissed Angela in the break room with everyone watching. They gossiped about it for an hour or two—Pam taking notes to relate it all to Jim when he got back from Australia on Thursday. Things went back to normal by lunch. Roy didn't even come up to eat with her.

The days stretched and when Thursday came and went with no sign of Jim, she was sure she had written the date down wrong. But by five o'clock Friday, she knew he wasn't coming back.

Sometimes she thinks she sees him, even hears him, when she's at the office late at night, alone. And maybe it is him…the ghost of him, lingering around, torturing her for not knowing what she could have had. Because she can't have it now. No amount of regret can change her timeline, change her life. She's stuck with what she's got…

And what she has is Roy.

She loves him. She does.

But she doesn't crave him. She doesn't yearn for him. Not the way she craves the scent of turpentine in the early dawn after a night of furious, erotic, passionate painting. Not the way she yearns for the feel of cool paint on her skin. The way the texture changes as it dries and crinkles her fingers. The way that same paint hides under her nails and how it still sticks after fifty scrubs. She has never yearned or craved Roy like that. It's only now that she realizes that she craved and yearned and desired and just _needed_…and so many more words that she doesn't think she's smart enough to know...she craved Jim like that. She wanted him more than anything…only she didn't know it until it was too late. Until he was gone and she was left with a gaping hole in her chest where he had nestled in ever so quietly in his special Jim-way. And she'd been too comfortable to ever notice.

She doesn't wake up in the morning energized and ready to go to work anymore, because when she gets there, Jim's still not there. And he's not coming back.

He'll never come back.

It'll never be the same. She knows this, but she can't help thinking it might.

Tonight will be the night she starts dreaming again. She'll dream of Jim, surrounded in reds and oranges and vibrant greens. He'll be her canvas. He'll be the light that guides her back from the shadows of her future.

Tonight she will dream and hope. Hope that one day that dream can come true. That one day when she wakes up, she will have run as far away from the altar as she can get and straight into Jim's arms.


End file.
